Which LPWA Technology Will Win?

There are many technologies available which can be used to create an LPWAN, and these can be classed into licensed/standardized or unlicensed/proprietary types. In the run up to 3GPP Release 13 LPWANs, we believe it is the use case or application which determines the best technology choice for the LPWAN. The sheer scale of the LPWAN market and number of applications is such that there is room for both licensed and unlicensed LPWAN technologies. The evolution to NB-5G in Release 14 and Release 15 will serve to open up additional use cases, such as mMTC and URLLC, which the proprietary schemes may not be able to tackle. There will be no “winner” in the LPWA technology ecosystem. Each technology will find its niche according to the application or use case for which it is deployed.